Month: January 2006

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Really True Lies

Quite a few years ago, I was teaching at a Christian High School in Chatham, Ontario, when a gentleman named Dan Veltman was booked to speak to our youth about modern culture.

It was an odd presentation. Most church people who condemned rock’n’roll and television and movies at that time didn’t really know the names of any of the bands or actors or writers, or how modern culture was packaged. Veltman did. But people who did know something about popular culture usually didn’t make simplistic black and white judgments about what was “evil” out there and what was good. Veltman did– it was all evil. He showed us evil album covers and played us evil music and discussed subliminal advertising which wanted you to think about evil things like “sex”, and backwards masking. Our students– I kid you not– were thrilled. They were absolutely delighted to know that the the music they listened to was absolutely, irredeemably evil. They wanted more details.

It was very entertaining, like the orgies depicted in the film “The 10 Commandments” before Moses arrived with the tablets to set things right again. You could have your cake and eat it too. You could enjoy watching the skin, and then pat yourself on the back by rooting for Moses. I don’t think any of the students actually changed their listening habits or viewing preferences. They just felt better knowing that we knew that they knew that drugs and sex and violence were bad.

The formula hasn’t changed much for “True Lies”. Want to be a god-driven biblical prophet to today’s youth? Fork over $1295 (come on– you can get your church to raise the money) and join the “True Lies” team. We supply the power point presentation (the orgy) and you supply the fire and brimstone. Teenagers will actually ask you to make a presentation to their parents. Just so parents can see that they are really mature and self-controlled, and shocked, I say, shocked, to know that there is so much sex in the movies.

Cost of a good dose of self-righteous vilification? $495. The presenter gets to keep that money. It’s a franchise.

Interestingly, “True Lies” tries to enhance it’s currency with youth by claiming links to Hollywood and bands like Metallica, among others. We know evil. Chalmers website shows a picture of him standing with Jessica Simpson.

He claims to have actually interviewed a serial killer. “Which rock’n’roll song made you a killer. Come on. Was it ‘Do you Really Want to Hurt Me’?”

That’s rather amazing. While preaching against Hollywood values, he proudly poses with his arm around Jessica Simpson. Look at me: I’m hip. But not too hip. Jessica and I are headed right over to the malt shop to meet Bobby and Ritchie and the Fonz….

I wonder how many schools and churches see what I see: a money-making scam run by people with the astounding audacity to claim to enlighten your children about how our culture is trying to trick them while selling you a paschal of hokum.

The trouble is that the real immorality in our culture is rooted in an ideology of unlimited wealth and consumer gratification. Your teenagers won’t even sit still for a lecture on immorality: it has to be presented in the form of rock videos!

The sexual immorality and drugs are a relatively small part of the equation. Chalmers rapturously caresses his Hummer, beams next to Jessica Simpson, touts his celebrity endorsements, and offers to sell your house, while promising to wean your children off those decadent, twisted Hollywood values.

What qualifications do you need to be a Christian expert on culture, the media, and communications? $1295.00 U.S. And, you can’t smoke. Can’t drink. And you should be an expert on…. say, did we mention the $1295.00? By the way, if you don’t complete that first year, “True Lies” gets to keep your money. But you get books and brochures that you can sell– at wholesale prices.

Seriously, the application to become a speaker for “True Lies” asks one question that relates to a person’s actual expertise on popular culture: “name the last three movies you saw”. But that’s okay, because the expertise is supplied by headquarters, in the form of Powerpoint presentations.

From the website: “This video covers some of the themes of today’s popular music, including sex, violence, Satanism, rebellion against parents, and drug use. Video contains lots of quick moving MTV footage, designed for the MTV generation.” Yes, your children won’t fall asleep while they are being saved from eternal perdition.

Who is Phil Chalmers? He drives a Hummer, which is displayed somewhat fetishisticly on his web page..

How much do you want to bet…. that none of these workshops and seminars provided by “True Lies” includes any form of two-way discussion at all. Since their speakers are not really experts, and you are not expected to question the absolute reliability of their conclusions about pop culture, why would there need to be? Besides, then you would actually be trying to teach young people to think.

Chalmers real goal is simply to replace one set of programming instructions with another. Buy this….

As almost every other American “ministry”, the web page is mostly about buying the box set for $40.00. The money-changers are in.

And… he’s a Re/Max agent. I kid you not. On the same web-page where he promises to save American youth from the ravages of Satanic music and film– hey, are you moving?

Unexpected: www.truelies.org now just pops right up with Phil Chalmers’ charming buzzcut at www.philchalmers.com. . His website–curiously– has a link to thesmokinggun.com

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Diebold’s Election Scam Machines

“In May, two more tests were held, this time with Hursti present. Using a device bought for about $200, he was able to easily alter the final vote by changing the program stored on the memory card.

“You have to admit these systems are vulnerable and act accordingly,” Hursti said.

Diebold took a dim view of the experiments. On June 8, a senior company lawyer faxed Sancho: “You have willfully and intentionally allowed the manipulation of memory cards related to your elections. . . . We believe this to have been a very foolish and irresponsible act.”

Okay. Did you get what happened there? Let’s say you wanted to make sure no one could cheat on the results of an election. You make a machine that counts the votes. That’s good. Once a citizen votes, no one can go into the machine and change the results of the votes, without getting caught, easily, right?

Wrong. All you need to do is get physical possession of the machine. Like any election volunteer.

And Diebold is outraged. Outraged, that an election official in Florida would allow someone to alter the file on the memory card– just like any unauthorized person could do in a real election. Outraged that an election official would dare to expose the fact that an outrageously expensive system for counting votes doesn’t even have basic data security built in, something that Microsoft, incredibly, has finally mastered itself in Windows 2000.

If you wrote a program in Visual Basic to handle voting on a Microsoft Windows computer and stored the results in an Oracle or SQL Server table, almost any reasonably good programmer could encrypt the table so that only a technician with administrative access could possibly alter the data in a raw table.

Diebold has made a lot of money off of this scam. And you and me and everyone, including the tooth fairy, knows who will end up paying the costs of developing a new system that is actually secure..

You and me, baby.

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Oprahfied Culture

I watched the debate about James Frey’s book, “A Million Little Pieces”, unfold, with interest. If you’ve read through my previous stuff, you won’t be shocked to find that I think the book is a sham and should be relabeled as “Bullshit” (not as “fiction”, because that would require some art).

Frey says “the emotional truth is there”. Nobody said it wasn’t. It isn’t, but who said it wasn’t. The emotional truth is weighted to an enormous degree by our understanding of what is true and what is not. But who cares? But most people don’t like liars. We especially don’t like liars when they try to manipulate our emotions with their lies. Like James Frey.

But nor should it surprise anyone that Oprah defends the book. The “underlying message”, she said, “still resonates for me”. Oprah’s entire career has been built on catering to her audience, delivering something that “resonates” with millions of viewers. And what “resonates” with millions of viewers? Manipulation and pre-packaged pseudo-emotional experiences.

“A Million Little Pieces” is about, in part, the ordeal of pulling yourself out of deep shit by your bootstraps and remaking your life into something good. How can you not feel cheated if the author misrepresents the actual scale of the problem? If his own triumphant journey started halfway down the track? This book has implants.

Oprah is not a journalist. She is an entertainer. The Oprah show is always, first and foremost, about Oprah. Every interview is about Oprah. Every gift she gives does not announce to the world that this cause or this person or this service is so worthy and so honorable and so true that it deserves a gift. It announces that Oprah is so worthy and so honorable and so true because she has bestowed this gift on people she deems worthy. When she interviews Elie Wiesel, the show is about Oprah being somewhere up there with Eli Wiesel– the high priestess of compassion on those with low self-esteem– the holocaust is incidental.

Oprah says she chooses books of the month based on the quality of the book. But if the author won’t show up on her show to conduct a session of mutual admiration, that book no longer deserves a second of her time. If she had any class or journalistic integrity, she’d keep the book as her choice and promote it and say, “just because the author doesn’t like schmoozing with a tv celebrity doesn’t mean the book isn’t worthy of your attention.”

Now Oprah might rightly complain that this is a bum rap because most news “journalists” in America do what she does.

And that, sadly, tragically, is true.

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Cisneros Update

About six years I go, I wrote a piece on one of the most amazing examples of otherwise rational, reasonable, responsible people going absolutely crazy that I have ever seen. The Cisneros affair, in which a public official was hounded into prison for not stating how much money he had paid his ex-mistress as alimony, after going back to his wife.

You probably don’t believe me. Why would the government spend $21 million (the figure given varies widely) investigating something that was not illegal– except that Cisneros did not state the correct amount when he was interviewed by the FBI as part of a background check for his appointment as head of HUD by Clinton? Because Janet Reno is a hysterical witch-hunter, that’s why. There was something about Cisneros’ offense– probably, the fact that he had left his wife– that imputed a kind of sinister magical aura to the deception. With a Democratic attorney-general treating the trivial matter seriously, the Republicans must have thought Cisneros was Satan himself.

Any sane person would ask, if this is the best the Republicans do at the moment, they are indeed desperate.

Lest you think that anybody has regained their sanity since then– other than Clinton, who pardoned him– check this out. The Republicans, who, glowing with an absorbed sense of impunity– they can do whatever they want because God told them to– are out for more blood. Especially with scandals brewing in their own cesspools.

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James Frey Gets Oprahed

I watched the debate about James Frey’s book, “A Million Little Pieces”, unfold, with interest. If you’ve read through my previous stuff, you won’t be shocked to find that I think the book is a sham and should be relabeled as “Bullshit” (not as “fiction”, because that would require some art).

Frey says “the emotional truth is there”. Nobody said it wasn’t. It isn’t, but who said it wasn’t. The emotional truth is weighted to an enormous degree by our understanding of what is true and what is not. But who cares? But most people don’t like liars. We especially don’t like liars when they try to manipulate our emotions with their lies. Like James Frey.

But nor should it surprise anyone that Oprah defends the book. The “underlying message”, she said, “still resonates for me”. Oprah’s entire career has been built on catering to her audience, delivering something that “resonates” with millions of viewers. And what “resonates” with millions of viewers? Manipulation and pre-packaged pseudo-emotional experiences.

“A Million Little Pieces” is about, in part, the ordeal of pulling yourself out of deep shit by your bootstraps and remaking your life into something good. How can you not feel cheated if the author misrepresents the actual scale of the problem? If his own triumphant journey started halfway down the track? This book has implants.

Oprah is not a journalist. She is an entertainer. The Oprah show is always, first and foremost, about Oprah. Every interview is about Oprah. Every gift she gives does not announce to the world that this cause or this person or this service is so worthy and so honorable and so true that it deserves a gift. It announces that Oprah is so worthy and so honorable and so true because she has bestowed this gift on people she deems worthy. When she interviews Elie Wiesel, the show is about Oprah being somewhere up there with Eli Wiesel– the high priestess of compassion on those with low self-esteem– the holocaust is incidental.

Oprah says she chooses books of the month based on the quality of the book. But if the author won’t show up on her show to conduct a session of mutual admiration, that book no longer deserves a second of her time. If she had any class or journalistic integrity, she’d keep the book as her choice and promote it and say, “just because the author doesn’t like schmoozing with a tv celebrity doesn’t mean the book isn’t worthy of your attention.”

Now Oprah might rightly complain that this is a bum rap because most news “journalists” in America do what she does.

And that, sadly, tragically, is true.

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Paul Bernado’s Mom

Marilyn put on more and more weight. She became grotesquely obese. Signs of severe depression were very noticeable. She stopped taking care of the home and the children and withdrew into her own world in the basement of the house. (From the Criminal Library Website, the entry on Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, a paragraph on Paul Bernardo’s parents, his mother, Marilyn.)

Spare a thought or two for Paul Bernardo’s mom.

Life is tough. You fall in love with a guy but he’s uneducated so your father forbids you to marry him. You marry some other guy and he cheats on you and beats you. You have an affair with the guy you first fell in love with and have an illegitimate child you name “Paul”. You put on more and more weight and eventually you find yourself living in the basement of your own house, indifferent to everything, wallowing in your own grotesque prison of flesh and disappointment.

You son grows up to be a psychopathic killer and notorious for some of the most shocking crimes in the history of this province. Nice life.

It is for Paul Bernardo’s mom that the tv sings it’s siren song of comforting anesthesia. The one thing I’m sure she has down there, in her basement, is a tv. And all the illusions of life that make everything glamorous and good chunnel into her basement through the cable and make things seem right and true and good.

From the same website (crime library):

Paul used Amway techniques in many facets of his life, not only in sales and business but also in personal relationships.

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Alito’s Joke

The Judicial Committee Hearings on Judge Alito are the funniest in years. The Democrats ask him what his view on abortion is and he says he has no views and even if he did, it would be unethical for the Senate to approve of a candidate to the Supreme Court who could actually explain what he thinks about the law.

The Republicans crawl on the floor and kiss his wounded knee. His wife bursts into tears and flees the room. Oh, those nasty, nasty, vicious, oppressing, liberals!

George Bush admits that he nominated a man with no views at all. He would like Alito to approach each case that comes before the Supreme Court the way a good chef approaches brain surgery.

Is anybody really confused? The Bush Administration knows that it could never nominate the candidate it really wants– James Dobson– to the Supreme Court, so they find a low-profile candidate and tell him to hide his views and then try to pass him off as a moderate and attack the Democrats for being obstructionist and for supporting “activist” judges.

It’s not an activist judge that locks up people without trial? Or has evidence destroyed so DNA testing can’t prove innocent people have been executed?

If abortion ever comes before the Supreme Court, Justice Alito promises to approach the issue with an open mind. I repeat: with an open mind. George Bush did not put him on the Supreme Court to please the Christian Right. How could he have, when clearly Alito has no beliefs about the issue of abortion. None at all. If you have a book on abortion that you could send him, he would appreciate it, because he has never, ever given the slightest thought to the issue of abortion. In fact, if you could send him a doctor who could, in plain English, explain to Judge Alito what abortion is, that would be wonderful and he would be ever so grateful.

I can just imagine him jumping out of his chair after a presentation, “by golly– I was wrong! I think a woman does have the right to terminate a pregnancy.”

That, at least, is the possibility he asks us to imagine. Is this a lie? Would Jesus lie?

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Yousef Cat

I just watched a documentary on the man formerly known as Cat Stevens, also formerly known as Steven Demetre Georgiou, now known as Yousef Islam, the man who renounced his gift.

Well, he does have musical talent. But at a very raw level, all of his music stopped being interesting the moment he embraced religion in 1977. Quick, name one song Stevens wrote after his “crisis”. Okay– not totally fair. For most of the religious portion of his life, Yousef did not write music, because his God did not care for it very much.

The documentary itself is one of those disagreeable, fawning tributes that almost always is the result of some kind of deal between the subject and the “journalist”. No reporter is identified. No one asks Yousef any questions or follow-up questions. There is no independent critical appraisal of the information presented on the screen. It’s a puff peace. I doubt the makers of it care much if it ultimately damages their cause. It’s possible most people don’t care.

On the most contentious issue, Stevens alleged endorsement of the fatwa imposed on Salmon Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini, Stevens claims he was misquoted and that his views were distorted. But then he asserts that the punishment for blaspheme is, indeed, death. “My only crime was, I suppose, in being honest. I stood up and expressed my belief and I am in no way apologizing for it.”

Okay. So you’re sorry you’re right.

Surely his recent pronouncement, in song, that he never wanted to be a star must also be taken as some kind of joke and reflects another attempt to have it both ways. Like St. Augustine in his “Confessions”, Stevens enjoys the luxury of the well-rested virtue that awakes refreshed.

Cat has kittens: 4 girls and 1 boy.

Having it both ways: Cat has renounced his music many times, and even proclaimed that many of his early songs– “Lady D’Arbinville”?– were immoral. But he sells boxed sets out of his own offices in London and helps his record company promote sales of his entire catalog. But… he also has stated that profits from the “immoral” songs go to charities, as if this somehow preserves his personal purity and absolves him of any responsibility for how his songs might affect someone.

Stevens donates considerable time and money to charities that benefit Islamic children and families. He supports four Islamic schools in London. He’s obviously a generous man, to the needy in his community. More recently, it is reported that he donated half the royalties from a boxed set of his music to the families of the victims of 9/11. The U.S. still denied him entry in September 2005 over rather spurious allegations that he had terrorist links. Holy Soviet Union!

The Flaming Lips had to pay Cat some cash, and co-credit, for a song “Fight Test” that appeared to be unduly similar to “Father and Son”. In fact, give it a listen– it’s not just a phrase that’s been “borrowed”.

How peace-loving is Cat today? Some suspect that this Peace Train might be off the rails. But the best comment on his sudden deportation might be this one: “… the theatricality with which the incident was handled should inform us as to the motivation behind it.”

Beard vs Beard: in the latest round of earnest bearded singer-songwriters from the 1960’s and 70’s, current standings:

1. Cat Stevens – best musician.
2. Kris Kristofferson – best imitation of “just folks” by a very shrewd, very market-savvy Rhodes Scholar (yes he is).
3. Donovan – performer most likely to drive you into swallowing an entire furby.

Okay, okay– I know Donovan didn’t have a beard, but he wrote “Catch the Wind”, which is almost as bad and still feels like a hairy face to me.

Cat Stevens actually had a string of some very good albums back there in the early 1970’s, from Mona Bone Jakon to Catch Bull at Four. He could be a tad precious at times, but there more than a few great songs in there, including “18th Avenue” and “Sitting”. Then all of his good taste evaporated and he released several utterly dismal, programmed albums like “Foreigner” and “Buddha and the Chocolate Box”.

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Copyable Media

From the online forums….

“One key fact is that the copyright holder still *does* have the right to decide to expose and sell their product efficiently, inefficiently, or not at all. You, on the other hand, have NO rights to that product or that decision. You have NO right to decide how the product should be exposed or distributed. “

Not quite that simple. I absolutely agree, though, that any musical artist has every right to NOT distribute their music on CD. Go for it, Ashlee! No problem there.

But… the general public, the consumer, made the choices (from among competing technologies) that established vinyl, then cassette, then CD as the format of choice for musical recordings.

The public also has a right to expect that providers of content compete fairly in the market place. If Ashlee wants to issue her recordings on vinyl, she can. That way nobody will steal her work. Some other artists might conclude that they could compete successfully against Ashlee by issuing their work on more popular mediums, but who am I to second guess them! So if you want Ashlee’s work, buy her vinyl album. That’s your choice and you’re free to make it.

But she should not have the right to collude with other recording artists to force Pioneer and Toshiba and Sony to hijack the CD format and impose changes on it that the public didn’t ask for and does not  want.

She and the other artists are absolutely, totally, completely free to go to Toshiba and Sony and Pioneer and offer to pay them to develop a new uncopyable technology that will only be used to distribute her music on.

The public, I’m sure, will adopt it in droves, especially once they understand that they can’t use it to make their own recordings or assemble their own music collections, or play it on the portable players they already own.

Go for it Ashlee! Please!

(Incidentally, I don’t mean to pick on Ashlee. I really don’t know anything about her other than the Saturday Night Live gaffe.)

Bottom line. I have no problem with artists switching to a new medium that prevents copying. As long as other artists have the right to continue using copyable mediums like the CD or Radio or television with a stereo signal if they want to.

Now you’re a young artist. You want to become famous and have people hear your music and sell a few CD’s and tickets to your shows. You gonna join the proprietary, protected gang, or offer your stuff to the public on their medium of choice?

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Copyright and Copywrong

(From a discussion on usenet)

Skip this if you don’t want to be bored. But if you think the CD as the medium of distribution for music might soon be obsolete…

Actually, your point is well taken. I have often thought and said that I wish some days that the copyright-holders get exactly what they wish for. Because it would kill them off more quickly. What I believe is happening is that copyright holders want it both ways. They want to benefit from widespread exposure. Then they want to assert the right to not expose their work.

I firmly believe that if the government had required Microsoft to put effective copy protection on all of their products, we wouldn’t have the monopoly we have now. And I firmly believe Microsoft knew that, and that is why, when Word Perfect, for example, removed copy protection from their product, Microsoft almost immediately did the same. It is therefore hypocritical of Microsoft to demand protection from competition, by asserting their copyright. Compete!

And, in fact, you can easily see that Microsoft has been very circumspect on this issue. They know dimly what Google understands completely: there’s a lot of money to be made in giving away your product.

As for music, copyright holders want their music exposed, on radio and tv, in promotional tie-ins, scandalous newspapers, etc., etc. If you truly believe that Ashley Simpson gets her face on my local entertainment section because even a Kitchener, Ontario newspaper believes she is so talented she deserves it, God bless you, but I don’t. She is there because her corporate Svengalis want her “exposed”. They want you to see her face. They have established a very sophisticated and effective system of promotion that ensures that her face will be on magazine covers. They will also want you to hear her music– why else would you buy her CD? Most commercial radio stations only play music by artists they believe will obtain wide exposure through tv and magazines. One hand washing the other. They all profit by selling advertising, not music.

Since I have no intention of spending one red cent on Ashley Simpson products, I would have no problem with her corporate Svengalis being absolutely, totally successful in preventing me from being exposed to her music, her face, or her tantrums, without having paid for permission. Go to it! Please– be absolutely successful. Prevent her music from ever being downloaded to my computer, or played on my radio station, or her face from being on my tv, or in my local newspaper, unless I actually offer you money for it.

I have absolutely no problem with finding my music by reading reviews or hearing personal recommendations from people I know instead. I also like to support local talent.

But that, of course, does not happen. And up until recently, this system worked to the advantage of the big corporations, who could control access to the actual product, the CD. Now the corporations have lost control over the actual product, so the system is becoming unbalanced. But only if you believe that for the rest of all time, we must all consume music by purchasing a discrete material product, and music companies must only profit through the sale of that physical product.

That model has been made obsolete by technology and the music industry (and Hollywood and television) are crying the blues and they refuse to accept it. They are the carriage-makers of our era. They deserve to go out of business because they have failed to adjust to changing market realities. In retrospect, does anybody doubt that if the music companies had moved aggressively to make their entire catalogues available as paid downloads in a high quality format that they would not have made a killing? It took Apple to show them it could be done. But it might well be too late. As with prohibition, individual transgression has been replaced with a transgressive infrastructure that will not be easily suppressed.

Google, iTunes, eBay, and Amazon, and even Microsoft, are the new emblems of astute corporations that understand where the market is going and what it wants. All this wailing and gnashing of teeth is misplaced. The music industry should sit down together, face the fact that the old model of business practice is now obsolete, and move on to something new, or join the other dinosaurs in the museum.

Congress, despicably, in exchange for ready election campaign cash, is doing everything it can to keep an obsolete business model afloat– this from alleged believers in a “free market” (“free” for everyone else). It’s like requiring train companies to keep stokers employed. Or more like when a city in Bolivia tried to make it illegal to save rain water in order to help a private American company make a bigger profit with it’s monopoly on the water supply.

The museum is full of creatures that failed to adapt.

Finally, I absolutely believe that a very profitable music business model can survive downloading. How does Google make money?

The difference is, the Recording industry will have to work hard and use their brains. That might be asking too much….

A recent documentary film producer was asked to pay $10,000 for the rights to use a six-second cell-phone ring tone that was derived from the theme from ROCKY (Gonna Fly Now). Tragically, he couldn’t afford a team of lawyers, so he had to pay a negotiated amount less than that, even though he was not convinced that he had to pay, legally, for it’s use in a documentary.

That is not really farce anymore: it’s tragedy.